Our meeting started off with a tour of the the home and its story. 1414 Evans Ave is one out of three homes in Ft Worth that still remains in the Victorian style architecture and has stood there for over 100 years. The only information that was found on the first people to live in the house were the Nickles family, and the second family to stay there was the Nickles-Mickles. All other information has been lost to time. As other members trickled in, we all sat down and began to expand the story to the neighborhood and the city.
Down the street from the house, the Ella Mae Shamblee library is named after an African woman. Ms Shamblee borrowed books from libraries ad would walk and down streets with a trolly of the borrowed books so that children could read at home and become educated. Her legacy lives on as the local library is filled with various books and materials for the entire Southside community.
In time, as de-segregation was unfolding the wealthy African Americans in the area did what most wealthy families do. They moved out, the wealth of the community left, and the Southside area fell into poverty.
After the story, we sat down for tea and a lite snack. This ritual is being utilized by Ms Brown to invite anybody into her home to talk and discuss the future of the area. She's brought in homeless people to hear their stories and to show them respect and care as a fellow brother or sister. The discussion of the past shifted into action, we went for a short walk to an area that is being re-developed to revamp the area. As we walked out, our stroll through history revealed truths about education, the civil rights movement, and gardening that we were once ignorant about.
Within the Southside area, Raziq Brown, Ms Brown's son, told us about the home of the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement for Colored Peoples, the many churches that are in the area, the Civil Rights movement in Southside, the education of African Americans, and the introduction of gardens and animals to the African community.
In 1957, the Botanical Gardens and the zoo were finally opened to African American children under the sponsor and supervision of a white family. In other words, Africans had to let their children go with a family they've never met and let them be watched by that family to go to a garden or a zoo. This was only 55 years ago. The negative connotations of gardens and zoos are communicable from parent to child to grandchild. At the same time, some African people remember a day when they could walk down the street and pick fresh fruit from any yard on their way back home from a day's work or from school. Our journey through time brought us back to where we are and what we have to do now.
Simply by learning about the past, we have experienced a small snippet of the struggles of a large part of our community and gained an understanding of the hurdles we face today because of it.
By learning about our past, we can understand the present, and we can direct the future.
